Charting a path to Azure for Shoalhaven City Council

Shoalhaven City Council is a large regional council overseeing 49 towns and villages on the South Coast of NSW. With a population of more than 108,500 people, Shoalhaven is known for its pristine beaches, striking coastal plains and surrounding mountains. The area has several award-winning wineries and an array of outdoor adventure, history, arts, and cultural experiences that entice visitors to the region.

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Challenge

The Shoalhaven City Council already had most of its applications as SaaS-based services. However, critical applications were still housed onsite, including its document management system and a Geographic information System (GIS) for spatial data. GIS data is also valuable during a natural disaster, adding to the need for a safer and more secure solution.

With both compute and disk capacity approaching their limits, the Council's IT team faced a decision to either invest in hardware and refresh its on-premises infrastructure or invest in Azure and move all applications across to the cloud. 

Shoalhaven City Council needed a solution that would: 

• Improve performance and connectivity across its vast region of 85 sites
• Outsource hosting of server infrastructure to an external provider.
• Find the best option for its production workloads and application hosting
•  Consider the full range of costs involved with an Azure migration
• Maintain an agnostic perspective around infrastructure solutions

Solutions

The Logicalis Australia team began with an initial consulting period for Shoalhaven City Council to assess their environments and existing infrastructure properly. The in-depth analysis mapped out the possible approaches and allowed for a more complete costing of the recommended solution. The cost estimates considered several factors, including licencing, real estate, additional funding, and ongoing monthly costs based on current usage.

According to Dane Hamilton, CIO at Shoalhaven City Council, "Logicalis was able to bring their deep knowledge and experience in the space to present a well-packaged concept. They had a template and a solution design with aspects that had already been implemented elsewhere. We were confident they could deliver the solution and that they didn't miss any aspects in its design."

A “Lift and shift with Re-IP” approach was used to migrate workloads into Microsoft Azure using Azure Migrate.

Logicalis’ Production Ready Cloud Platform (PRCP) is the result of migrating, deploying, running, optimising, and improving thousands of workloads in Azure. Security best-practices are architected into the platform to provide the guardrails and compliance that all organisations need when it comes to the public cloud. It has built-in backup and DR policies as well as automated workflow for cloud governance to minimise cloud sprawl which are all present within this proven platform.

Logicalis  migrated the following Shoalhaven workloads:

• 56 Windows VMs being migrated via "Lift & Shift" Method
• 1 VM being refactored to Azure Blob Storage
• 3 VMs being refactored to Azure Files
• 3 VMs being refactored to Azure DNS
   

Outcome

• Risk Mitigation – By shifting its document management and GIS systems to Azure, Shoalhaven City Council has helped to ensure these systems are geographically separated and thereby reducing the risk of being impacted by a disaster.
• Greater Security & Resiliency – Shoalhaven City Council's new cloud environment keeps track of all changes. It leverages the latest firewalls and security features to reduce the likelihood and impact of cyber-attacks and internal misconfiguration.
• Continuous Improvement – With hundreds of new services released each year, Shoalhaven City Council can now gain access to continual innovation and maintain the agility of their new solution.
• Centralisation & Visibility – The new well-governed cloud environment helped to decentralise its IT environment, providing clearer visibility of services used treating costs as an operating expense rather than sporadic capital outlays to renew server infrastructure.
• High Availability – Shoalhaven City Council has already experienced a reduction in unplanned downtime instances since moving to Azure.
• Improved Automation - Platform and application automation enables better management across IT environments and improved self-service capabilities. 
   

After the project was delivered, the Logicalis team were noted for their adaptability and flexibility in delivering the engagement. The Council team pointed out that the account management and project management from Logicalis was exceptional.